Sweet Maria's Weblog

As new coffees roll in, we have been scoring them with our new spider graphs. We hope they are (and have been) a great tool to help you decide what coffees to buy from our site. We suggest that you also pay attention to the written comments as well since numbers aren't always the best way to judge a coffee's taste. If you are really into the dark chocolate notes and heavy body of coffees from Nicaragua and Sumatra, you will probably be disappointed with even the highest scoring Gesha coffees that have a very light body and floral notes.

Colombia Timana de Huila is a blend we constructed from a few of the better small producer lots we tasted. At City+, this coffee is all about balance. A mild cup that can handle roast, it's what we think daily drinking coffee should taste like!

Brazil Dry Process Santa Ines is not as fruit-forward as others (they're there, just subtle), this one's heavy in the developed sugar matrix, and with a nice kola nuttiness. Perfect for dual use brewed coffee/espresso.

Ethiopia Grade 1 Yirga Cheffe Dumerso is our last Ethiopia of the season, and cupping better than some of the fresh offer samples we've been tasting! Stone fruit-forward, with heavy sugar-browning sweetness and citrus top note complexity.

Papua New Guinea Bauka Bena is our final PNG from the Bauka Plantation coffees we purchased. Only 3 bags, it shares much in common with the others from Bauka - earth toned, sweet grain, and fruited. And we also added a Fair Trade Organic coffee,

March 19th, 2015 (above: antique and vintage home roasters in the SM office)

We keep our coffee selection fresh here at Sweet Maria’s (see our recent blog post for more information about that.) We've started off the new year with some excellent coffees from Burundi and chose to roast my absolute favorite, the Kayanza Mpemba. We are also offering a coffee from Zimbabwe for the first time in eight years and I am very happy to offer it as the second roasted coffee in this installment of our bi-weekly subscription.

We had a pretty clear idea for the Burundi Kayanza Mpemba's roast profile going into our roast day. So, I decided to take the opportunity to roast a few different batches to a some different roast degrees within the city to city+ range. This mélange blend has great balance. It's one of my favorite coffees from our roasted coffee subscription so far. It has a nice vanilla sweetness and a pleasant citrus acidity that come together a bit like candied orange peel.